And I definitely am missing out on something. In the same way that the telephone was once a luxury, but now is as necessary as a letter-box, Facebook has become almost essential if you work amongst anyone aged 10-30.

Justin & Jenny Duckworth are to blame – they have written a book called “Against the Tide, Toward the Kingdom” and one of their helpful ideas is that we all have things to chuck out of the boat. In this metaphor, the boat is what we travel in on our kingdom journey.

Facebook needs to be chucked out of my boat.

What are the winds that make this storm?

First, we have a rapidly ageing workforce, and a majority of the population will be beyond working age. Two major consequences flow from this: 1) that there will be less tax dollars to fund human services such as mental health, community development, youth work, family support etc; 2) a generation which is, in general, more likely to serve the community, is going to disappear soon.

Second, my wife came back from a work conference at which a Department of Human Services (DHS) senior bureaucrat foresaw the withering of the welfare sector as the financial crisis that is currently engulfing Europe inevitably finds its way to Australia. Funding to nonprofits and human services will be cut drastically, with the idea of the Big Society coming to the fore. The Big Society is a UK policy of devolution of responsibility for communities to the local level. Usually, I am all for a such a redistribution of power to the local level: it gives responsibility and ownership to people on the ground, who know what their community’s need. My first thought was – that’s great that the financial crisis has stimulated such a creative policy.

But then the crunch came.

Mark Sayers spoke at “Heartland”, a Christian youth work training event organised by Praxis and others in Bendigo. There, he mapped the cultural terrain that youth workers need to navigate. Mark’s main point is that youth and young adults approach life from a consumer perspective. That is, choices of all descriptions (phone, job, education, church, relationships) are re-framed in terms of what is good for the individual. The arena of decision-making has become the individual, rather than the community. Mark gave a rousing challenge to us there, to model wholehearted commitment to the cause of the reign of God.

You might be able to see the connections I’m making here. The factors of ageing population and financial crisis/Big Society require a new generation of people committed to the common good, who make decisions within that orbit rather than their personal needs. Great! But the pervasiveness of a consumerist worldview, across most of the population, means that people generally have a consumer approach to community service. I’ll do this homework club until I get bored; I’ll read to these kids until their parents frustrate me; I’ll visit the nursing home for as long as it’s ‘rewarding’; I’ll mentor those young people until I get a job offer interstate.  This consumer approach to community service doesn’t build a community, it undermines it. Let me say that this attitude is not limited to young people and young adults.

What is needed? A body of people committed to the wellbeing of others and the community beyond personal comfort, whose source of motivation comes from beyond what others can give me. Sounds like the Church. Jesus Christ’s outright denial of a culture of reciprocity, which consumerism relies on (I’ll buy this if it gets me that; I’ll participate if I get X), is the good soil in which commitment to the common good can be fostered. And here is where I get alternately despondent and hopeful. On the one hand, the Church is withering away in Australia, and its numerically successful instances often rely on consumerism. On the other hand, there is a new movement of Christians excited about mission, pouring energy into their neighbours, schools, workplaces and communal institutions – that gives me courage!

However, if this ethic of community service doesn’t get passed on, and if the Church’s better angels don’t win out, and if the welfare sector we have contracted to do our dirty work for us is simply not there to hold back the tide, what’s going to happen? Wholesale breakdown of society. I’m not usually given to hyperbole, but I don’t see another option. Feel free to provide a more hopeful one.

In that day, the oddest book in the Bible, Revelation, will become eerily sensible. When humanity is stripped bare, when all the props have been knocked out, all that we have left is “patient endurance”. The book of Revelation advocates that the Church be the Church – if we allow God to shape us into that Church, there’s some hope.

Against the background of plural worldviews and competing interests, the church event is assuming an increased profile in the struggle to maintain Christian identity, a bolstered status as the marker of what it means to be Christian. In the face of a secular culture, church events become sharply focussed as a way to remind ourselves who we are. Churches pour huge amounts of energy into the music, preaching, environment and promotion for church events. Compare this to the time of Christendom, when most went to church on Sunday and Australia was a “Christian nation”. The church event had less focus and less energy, because it was not the only reminder of Christian identity.

In Christendom, the church and its purpose was affirmed by other cultural markers of Christianity, such as public prayers, significant media comment by church officials, no Sunday trading, honouring of Christian holy days.

Now, the range of cultural markers of Christian identity has reduced. So, the church event has acquired increased importance. But should it be this way? What are the alternatives to spending huge amounts of time, energy and money on an event that still requires people to come to us? I still think the church event is crucial as a public opportunity for people to encounter God through the community of Jesus, but we need to spread our resources around. There are other expressions of church that need our attention.

After having these thoughts, and I tend to have them frequently (not sure what that says about my state of mind!), I tell myself: “Dave, stop thinking that. We’re not in competition. We’re all in the same game.” Christian leaders often say the same thing: “We are not in competition”. When a new church starts up down  the road, or a ministry begins that needs the same sorts of leaders as you do…”We are not in competition”.

Let’s take a look at this aversion to competition, or the aversion to publicly admitting it. For this blog, I’m not examining the role of competition in business, sport etc, but between Christians groups.

Ostensibly, we don’t want to compete because we believe we are part of the “one body” of Jesus Christ. That’s true in an abstract sense. All people following Jesus are working towards revealing the Reign of God in all dimensions of life. However, this is not true in a practical sense – we are not working in one big church or mission organisation. There isn’t one “Jesus Church” to which all of us are members. There isn’t one big mission agency. Instead, there are thousands of groups, denominations, agencies etc, all trying to do the same thing in different ways. I think this is basically a good thing, because it allows variety of expression.

However, often these different bodies are quite similar: they have similar objectives, try to connect with a similar demographic, and need similar types of leaders. This is not a problem for anyone until these groups find themselves in the same ‘territory’, whether that be a university, neighbourhood, city  or ‘media space’. When this happens, competition can’t help but occur. It doesn’t usually occur on the level of the people they are trying to reach; there’s more than enough people to go around. But it happens more on the level of money and people. Money to resource their activities, and people to be contributors to making a Christian ministry or mission happen.

Up to now, I’ve been describing the situation, but the question is – Is Christian competition bad? Regular readers of this blog will know that I am going to give some thoughts on both sides of the question.

Christian competition is bad
On the ‘Yes’ side, Henri Nouwen certainly thought competition was in (umm) competition with the values of the Kingdom. He reveals:

I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me– my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts– and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards. (The Return of the Prodigal Son)

Christians in competition communicate that even when groups are on about the same thing, they can’t work together, a disappointing advertisement for the command to ‘love one another’. It’s a drain on the resources of time, energy and money of Christian groups. They all need to spend themselves in self-promotion in order to show their distinctiveness amongst the others, and self-promotion is poison to the good news. Smaller groups, who need to continue their valuable ministry, end up folding while the strong, populated and wealthy groups cannibalise the rest. Competition simply reflects the values of the success-oriented culture we find ourselves in.

Christian competition is good
On the ‘No’ side, arguing for competition as a necessary dimension of our existence:

[T]he Bible describes human beings making choices to stand against natural limitations of any kind when these are the result of the Fall, of sin, or of a broken world. Competition is necessary in order to struggle for that balance required to live …We compete in order to fulfill our purpose as human beings and live. (Udo Middelmann)

The benefits of competition are well-argued by economists, and I think some of them apply to Christian groups as well. There are often Christian groups and churches in which there is little spark left. Christ is with them as ‘two or three gathered together’, but as an organised group it is time for them to disband. A little competition from other groups can be persuasive. Competition also helps us clarify what our special ‘charism’ or gift is. Rubbing up against other groups refines what we are trying to do, and motivates us to improve what we do.

A Way Forward
In Perspectives on Competition – Christian & Otherwise, Dr. Sharon G. Johnson and Dr. Galen Smith give 4 approaches to Christian competition, in which they frame the question in terms of Christ’s relationship to competition:

1. CHRIST RESISTS COMPETITION: In this approach, competition is seen as antithetical to Christianity. It deserves no place in the individual or communal endeavours of Christians. It is a symptom and sign of evil in our world.

2. CHRIST AND COMPETITION IN PARTNERSHIP: In this approach, competition is an aid to the work of Christ in the world, and Christians should be involved in it. God is a competitive God!

3. CHRIST REFORMS COMPETITION: competition is seen as a qualified good, that Christians should be involved in, but need to challenge at some points. It is given by God, but in a fallen world is in need of redemption.

4. CHRIST AND COMPETITION IN PARADOX: this approach holds an uneasy tension with competition, recognising that the Bible warns against competitiveness, but also recognising that Christians are often in situations of competition that may contribute to the Reign of God.

My preference, when thinking about competition between Christian groups for resources (time, energy, money), is for the 4th approach. Competition exists, it can be good and it can be bad, it’s consequences can be good and bad, at times it seems to reveal God’s character, at times it seems to obscure it.

Your preference?

At the same time, I was asked to speak at the AGM of the Bendigo Chaplaincy Committee, a band of stalwarts who support the various chaplains in Bendigo. Here’s part of what I said, and you can read the whole speech here:

Charles Taylor, author of “A Secular Age”, puts it like this:

The shift to secularity…consists…of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.

Our culture’s whole approach to religion has changed: in our public spaces, in our individual beliefs, and in the soil in which faith takes root. Most of us are conscious of these changes, but our minds haven’t caught up with the reality. So, in some way, our minds still operate in the past, where God was central. But the rest of our culture is living in a different world.

What do these changes mean for chaplains? Chaplains mostly know these things – I’m saying them because chaplains rely on us, and we need to have a realistic view of the context they work in, and realistic expectations of what they can achieve.

1. God and public space: Chaplains used to occupy public space in schools through sermons at Easter and Christmas, Christian reflections in school newsletters and the like. As a teenager at a state school, I clearly remember the chaplain preaching at Easter and Christmas, and as a primary school student, being taken to the local church for an Easter service. Now, it’s becoming rarer for chaplains to give a Christian message at state school assemblies, as was once common. We can’t expect our chaplains to publicly proclaim the Christian message in compulsory school activities. We can’t expect Christians to be given privileged access to schools simply because we are Christians. That time is going and will soon disappear.
2. Individual Belief and Practice: when few people believe or practice a religion, is there a place for chaplains to foster religious practice in schools? When parents are not religious themselves, is it ethical for a chaplain to encourage religious practice in young people and children? In any case, chaplains are not building on a foundation of familiarity with the stories of Abraham & Jesus. More likely they are confronting an ignorance of these. We can’t expect chaplains to spend lots of time discipling young people, producing biblically literate young people
3. The atmosphere of belief: it is difficult for chaplains to encourage belief in a context where belief is now seen as odd, and unsupported by the majority of institutions in our country. Chaplains now have to rediscover what it means to create soil in which the seeds of faith can grow. That is a hard task, because we haven’t had to do it before.

I interviewed him the next morning about himself and his thinking on this subject. I’ll use some of this on my upcoming radio show (30th May, 6-8pm, streaming at phoenixfm.org)

You can also subscribe to my podcast on iTunes

One of the factors in the recent resurgence of interest in ANZAC Day has been the corresponding decline in mainstream religious participation. In 2005, the New Scientist magazine carried a story about a “religion gene”:

Until about 25 years ago, scientists assumed that religious behaviour was simply the product of a person’s socialisation – or “nurture”. But more recent studies, including those on adult twins who were raised apart, suggest genes contribute about 40% of the variability in a person’s religiousness.

Whatever this actually means in practice, it’s clear that we long to believe in a higher, larger truth than ourselves, and more significantly, to participate in rituals that point to that truth. I think that the resurgence of ANZAC memorials and pilgrimages to Gallipoli has its source in this reality. In short, when the religious life of transcendent traditions¹ declines, civil religions take their place. And that is what the resurgence of ANZAC Day is about – civil religion.

Rituals, processions, remembering the dead, even readings from Christian scripture (addressed in Jarrod’s article) – its all there. Now, my point is not that ceremonies which are not explicitly Christian are bad – of course not, ritual is a part of human life, whether externally religious or not. My problem is that such ceremonies induct us into a positive remembrance of war, verging at times on outright celebration, as we revere Gallipoli as a “national creation story”.

None of what I’m saying here negates these facts: that Australian soldiers possess courage; that we should recognise their suffering and bravery; that it is possible that war, like all hardship, can reveal positives in the human character; and that there should be some sort of ritual to remember these things. I affirm these things, and I admire the courage of those who go to war, even as I do not admire the task they fulfil.

But here we come to the nub of the problem. Australia has begun to see our warring history, and Gallipoli in particular, as emblematic of our character as a nation: a place and time where mateship was birthed, as a model for young people to venerate and aspire to, a place wherein the purifying violence of Suvla Bay a nation was truly formed. I do not affirm these things. I do not believe these things are healthy, because they essentially argue that the violence of war is a stable foundation for human relationships, individual character & vocation, and nationhood.

For Christians who follow a Jesus who died willingly to save the world (rather than kill to save it), any memorialising of war is a challenge to our faith. So what kind of memorial could I participate it? From a Christian point of view, any war is a violation of God’s creation, and God weeps over all those who die, and over all those whose participation in war has damaged them. Therefore I would like to see a memorial that remembers, and recognises, the dead from all the wars that Australia has fought in: from the Boer War through to Afghanistan and Iraq. I would like to see a ritual in which the dead of our enemies are brought to our attention, as well as our own dead. That way, ANZAC Day would truly be a remembrance of the horror of war

I finish with this quote from Jarrod McKenna’s own article:

If we say fighting is wrong, we spit in the face of all those soldiers who have bravely served their countries. But if we say the way to fight is with violence,then like those in Matthew’s passion account, we spit in the face of Christ. Do not judge those who did not know there was a better way. But it is a judgment of our Christianity if we remain silent as our governments sacrifice trillions of dollars and the precious lives of young people on the altar of unwinnable wars.

1. Those religious traditions with a belief in some kind of deity who includes, but also exists outside, human experience

Political Evangelism – the good news in the public sphere
Once upon a time, a young man in Europe was in court. His father, a wealthy textiles businessman, had taken him there because he had stolen some silk from his father’s factory, sold it and used it to fund some property development. During the public hearing, he renounced his father’s wealth, stripped off his clothes and strode away, naked, promising to serve ‘Lady Poverty’.

A while before that, another young man led the respected people of his nation to the rubbish dump, and informed them that they were responsible for a coming catastrophe. He told that they had filled the land with innocent blood, and that in return they would experience a military siege so terrible they would turn to cannibalism of their own families to survive. As a finale, he held a clay pot above his head and smashed it – “This pot is the house of Jerusalem and the house of Judah”.

The first young man was Francis of Assisi, and the second young man is the prophet known as Jeremiah. They were both prefiguring and continuing one of the most common practices of Jesus, which I call Political Evangelism.

Definitions
I realise I am using two words which are contested – often used for many different purposes. So let me define them.

By “political”, I mean:

• That which concerns power  and its use
• That which concerns the public sphere
• It is always personal, but never private (secret)
• I do not mean…’party politics’

By “evangelism”, I mean:

• That which concerns the good news, or the ‘evangel’ (GK) – the good news of God..a word used by the gospel writers to convey the message of the kingdom of God, which they had appropriated from the Caesars, who used the word ‘gospel’ to convey their victory in battle.
• That evangelism includes both a NO and a YES, judgement and mercy, criticism and invitation to a new life.
• Let us try to remove stereotypes of evangelism from our heads.

Political Evangelism, for the purposes of tonight is: Acts of public witness to the good news of God and his reign

Politics and Religion
Tonight I want to explore what place political evangelism might have in the life of the church, and in the interaction of the church with the surrounding public. We are often told that “religion and politics don’t mix”. The witness of the Bible and Christian history says that such a viewpoint is inaccurate, and also impossible. The problem is not that religion and politics mix, it is HOW they mix.

Tonight I will focus on one element of that mix – that of publically declaring (in word and deed) the good news. There are so many others ways that Christians act politically: from letter-writing to the clothes we buy, from how we make decisions in church to how we vote. Every act and decision we make is political, because human life is about allegiance. Who will we be loyal to? is the question to which the Christian answer is “Jesus is Lord”, not simply in a general sense but in a specific sense. Is Jesus our Lord in our finances, our employment, where our kids go to school, the kind of toilet paper we buy, how we produce and eat food etc etc etc .

I don’t have the whole picture, nor do I regularly do what I am going to talk about, but it’s something that I think needs to be thought about in the church, and acted upon. Also, I have my own political persuasions, but this seminar is not meant to be about my particular beliefs. I think that Christians of all political persuasions should be acting publically and politically. Again, the argument is not whether doing so is warranted – the argument is about HOW we do so.

Biblical Examples of Political Evangelism
Apart from the Jeremiah example, there are plenty of biblical instances of public acts of witness:

• Moses and the plagues (Ex 9-10)
• Elijah & the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:20-40)
• Jesus illegally healing on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:9-14)
• Jesus eating illegally on the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-28)
• Triumphal Entry to Jerusalem (John 12:12-15)
• Acts of Apostles: constant examples of healing and preaching in public, often provoking unrest, arrest, imprisonment and sometimes death.

Let us look at 3 of them, and for each I will look at what constitutes these acts of public witness: the setting, the symbols, the showing & telling, the consequences and why they are political and evangelistic acts.

1. Jeremiah 19 – the clay pot

• Setting: deliberately public – he leads the elders and senior priests to the entry of the Potherds Gate (entry to the rubbish dump)….sometimes called the Dung Gate (KJV)
• Symbol: clay pot –  visual as well as verbal; acts of public witness often use symbols to convey a message
• Showing and Telling of God’s judgement upon the idolatry and violence of Judah and Jerusalem:

Because the people have forsaken me, and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah have known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent, and gone on building the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as burnt-offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind (Jer 19:4-5)

• Consequences: Jeremiah is imprisoned and ‘struck’ (whipped?)  in chapter 20.
• Political – pitting the powers of Judah and Jerusalem (the elders and priests) against that of God.
• Evangelism – God’s judgement is always for the purpose of God’s eventual mercy and restoration of Israe

2. Matthew 12: 9-14 – illegal healing

• Setting:  the setting is a synagogue on the Sabbath…illegal to do any work on the Sabbath
• Symbol:  the man and his withered hand is the visual method that Jesus uses to demonstrate the heartlessness of the Pharisee’s way.
• Showing & Telling: Jesus commits a crime for 2 reasons: one is to heal the man, but the second is to create a counterargument about the Sabbath and what its purpose is. (see previous story of illegal eating).  Ongoing battle between Jesus and the powers – “…so that they might accuse him” (v. 10b)
• Consequences – the Pharisees conspire to destroy him.
• Political – it is about who has the power to say what is legal, and an ongoing battle of myths between religious leaders and Jesus.
• Evangelism – Jesus is communicating that healing is more important than a law.

3. John 12 – messianic battle
This story is one of the most obvious examples of Jesus acting in public and political way. Let us look at the sequence of story:

1. Enters Jerusalem
2. Hears the crowd’s messianic myth – “King of Israel”….what is a King for them? Violent, restoration of Israel. Look at Jesus reaction to this last time! (John 6:15)
3. Decides to get a donkey
4. Rides it, providing a countervailing myth of what it means to be Messiah

• Public: 6 days before Passover, Jerusalem is filled
• Symbol: donkey, a ridiculing of the stallion, the usual victor’s steed.
• Showing & Telling: Jesus does no telling, but his message is clear – his kingship is different.
• Consequences:  all the people go after him!
• Political – they want him to have power over them, to violently restore Israel
• Evangelism – the good news of a nonviolent Lord

So, in summary, political evangelism:

• Is public – people are watching, they can see us!
• Communicates a message about God and his good news.
• Almost always in conflict with other messages in society which are taken as normative
• Uses symbols to communicate
• Consequences are inevitable, both punitive and positive.
• Nonviolent

Political Evangelism in Christian history

• Telemachus (404): intervening publically in gladiatorial contest
• Francis of Assisi (1205): disrobing to demonstrate non-attachment to possessions
• Martin Luther (1517): nailing theses to the church door
• Civil Rights movement (1960s): counter sit-ins
• Pro life (20^th C): picketing abortion clinics
• Oath Keepers (20^th C): taking public oaths
• Women Christian Temperance Movement (late 19^th C on) : prayer inside saloons
• St Maximilian (295): refused in court to be conscripted and was executed

Political Evangelism Today
When Crown Casino was being established, a small movement existed to call attention to its degrading social effects, and the inappropriate relationship between the government and the casino owners. Each Sunday, we got together outside the site and prayed. We had a banner, and talked to people who approached us. We had T-shirts made up that communicated our message and also used the Crown Casino logo in a humourous way. We had a plenty of verbal abuse hurled at us, but also plenty of people who agreed with us.

I found this to be a good experience, but also a hard one, not least because of the reactions of Christians I spoke to about it. From those conversations, I began to think about the barriers to political evangelism.

Barriers to Political Evangelism
Acting publically and politically is difficult for all of us. There a few key barriers to Christians acting publically and politically.

1. FEAR:

• This includes embarrassment, wanting to avoid criticism or abuse, and the fear of being recognised by someone who may think badly of you.
• These things are absolutely understandable, but are also predicted by Jesus as expected consequences of following him…it may even show that we are on the right track

2. PRIVATISM: this is the belief that religious concerns are separate from political concerns, therefore Christians should keep their faith out of the public sphere.

• As I showed before, faith is a matter of allegiance, and allegiance is a matter of which power we will be loyal to.
• Christian faith is always personal, but it is never private. It is impossible to look at Jesus, and the church of Acts, and conclude that our faith is meant to be kept out of the public sphere.
• Christian faith is not captive to party politics, but that hardly means it is nonpolitical. Again, look at the conflicts Jesus has with the powers of his day; look at the way the apostles come into conflict with the powers of their day.

3. QUIETISM: this is the belief that ‘making a fuss’ in public is unproductive, and that the general public will be alienated from Christianity by public acts of witness.

• It is true that political evangelism will alienate people, as it will attract some people. Jesus predicted this, and demonstrated it in his own ministry. So that’s not an argument against political evangelism
• The question I would ask is – When has our social conformity assisted the church?
• Nonconformism was the order of the day in the early church, and that attracted people!
• I’m not arguing to be nonconformist unthinkingly, but for us, the church, to be our true selves, and not worry so much about what the world thinks
• Quietism is actually a product of the Christendom worldview, in which state and church gave each other power. The  church didn’t want to rock the boat because it had that power. Well, now we don’t have it! Let’s enjoy the freedom!

4. THE POWERS AND FAITH

• The most insidious reason we don’t want to do Political Evangelism is that we believe that the powers of state and corporations are basically in sympathy with the aims of the church, that we are walking arm in arm, that we basically have the same idea of what a ‘good’ society is.
• Now, if you believe that, then there is no reason for you to think about Political Evangelism.
• But if we don’t believe that – that is, if we believe that the aims of the community of Jesus are in conflict with the aims of political and economic powers, then we need to use every weapon in our arsenal to bring that conflict to light.

Conclusion
Public witness to God’s kingdom is clear throughout the Bible and in Christian history. The questions is not whether to do it, because that has been answered, the questions are WHEN and HOW.

I’m not going to give it to you because this post is not about the rightness of the sentence (the young man is obviously a danger to others) but about the media’s role. The newspaper is tabloid-sized, and this story completely covered the front page with a photo of the man, plus his name in the headline. I realise that, given he is 18 and had pleaded guilty, his face and name can be published. The newspaper acted legally, but did they act ethically?

As we go beyond the headlines, we find that this man’s father was killed in a car accident 10 years ago. Suddenly he transforms in our eyes from a 19 year old hoon to a 9 year old boy discovering his father is no longer alive. Any superficial study of youth development tells us that parents, particularly fathers, are key to a young boy becoming a responsible adult. A $65,000 payout from the TAC was put in a trust fund after this accident. At age 18, the boy promptly wasted it in a predictable stream of prodigality. I think we can confidently assume that this boy has not had the opportunity to develop in a healthy way.

This newspaper’s actions are unethical. There is no public benefit served in publishing this story in this way.  There is no benefit to the man found guilty. There is no deterrent effect, because any other so-called ‘hoon’ will see this as a special case because of his father’s death. The only effect is to stir up ill-feeling towards young people. Of course, this is not an isolated occurrence in the media. Young people doing stupid & criminal things are constantly in the news. In youth and social work this is called a ‘deficit approach’, in which the media chooses to highlight negative characteristics of young people. On page 13 of the same newspaper, Father Chris Riley (right) from Youth off the Streets spoke to 300 young people about leadership and character….putting that on the front page would have been fantastic.

Publishing this story is legitimate, but allow an obviously damaged young person the privacy needed to rehabilitate.